Documents / Official release
This is a preliminary transcript of Part I of the Gemini 4 (GT-4) flight crew debriefing. The Spacecraft Operations Branch of NASA's Flight Crew Support Division prepared it on June 16, 1965, from recordings of the debriefing held aboard the USS Wasp on June 9, 1965. In it, astronauts McDivitt and White describe the mission from an operational viewpoint, covering countdown, powered flight, insertion, orbital operations, reentry, landing and recovery. According to the preface, visual sightings were left for a later part.
From the source:Release of 2026-06-12 Incident: 6/9/65, North Atlantic Ocean. This document is a preliminary transcript (Part I) derived from voice recordings of the Gemini 4 flight crew debriefing taken aboard the recovery ship, USS Wasp, on June 9, 1965. Astronaut Ed White recounts seeing “sparkles” during the flight.
50 4 . 1 Station-Keeping McDivitt ~-IE>ENTIA L- start in the orbital flight with the station keeping on the booster. I think that we should just pluck that thing out and follow it through in its entirety , and then come back and pick up these things like the thrusters , Control :fode Checks , Com Checks , and those things . The station-keeping with the booster--Well, as I said earlier on the insertion phase , I started turning around as soon as I completed the forward thrusting. I jettisoned the nose fairings after about 30 or 40 degrees of yaw. I rolled right side-up and then I started yawing around to the left. We saw all kinds of debris floating around and we finally saw the booster back behind us. It was already in a peculiar attitude. As Ed men tioned , when we separated from the booster, it didn·• t really feel like we came off straight ahead . It seemed like we got knocked off to the side of the thing. The spacecraft-booster combination sort of bent in half at the separation plane . We yawed on around and saw the booster , and I thought it was around 400 feet back. Eli thought it was a little closer. -€0·NFIDE~L
Official release, from the pursue collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 340 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.